I am Henry and I am one of Storyhouse’s Young Catalysts! One of our topic areas this year has been sustainability and I wanted to share with you what we found out. I even had a great opportunity to interview Jess Curtis, Designer and Roberta, Project Manager in the eco-set! Enjoy!

Being sustainable is very important to us here at Storyhouse and we do whatever we can to be as eco friendly as possible. Over the past few months Jess Curtis (Storyhouse’s designer) and the wonderful team at Storyhouse have been making an eco-friendly set at the Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre this summer – Roberta (the project manager of the eco-friendly garden and the stage manager at Storyhouse) said this involved planting plants, caring for them and making sure that they were healthy – a lot of hard work! The idea came from Jess who wanted to make Storyhouse even more sustainable.

Normally, at Storyhouse, a lot of money would be put into making a set for a production and after the show had finished the set would sometimes just be thrown away, so Jess thought of the eco set so that we were being as kind to the environment as possible whilst making sure we don’t waste anything. Jess thinks that having sustainable initiatives like this is important as we need to act now to save the world we love. This year was the perfect opportunity for Jess to work her magic and make the set for The Jungle Book at this year’s Open-Air Theatre, the story is all about our relationship with nature and the earth. The set also has a lot of green coloured materials displayed around the garden, these materials where actually collected from various hotels around Chester that were throwing out sheets. These sheets where then dyed green and added to the set. This yet again demonstrates Storyhouse’s sustainability.

In addition, the Kitchen at Storyhouse only sells cans and glasses of water (recyclable materials) instead of non-biodegradable materials like plastic which takes between 10-1,000 years to fully decompose. As well as this, Storyhouse have their own bees! These bees live on the roof of Storyhouse, and the honey produced by them is used in the Kitchen, this really helps reduce our carbon footprint.

Here at Storyhouse a lot of shows are put on which means a lot of different costumes, well did you know that Storyhouse keep these costumes and reuse them? Storyhouse have a big storage unit full of costumes and instead of just buying new ones, they reuse them for different plays – incredible! Furthermore, most of the energy used by Storyhouse is supplied by the solar panels on our roof. Although the panels don’t power all of Storyhouse, we use the energy from the panels in the toilets and throughout the building. And it does not stop there, Storyhouse are still trying to be even more sustainable and we at Young Catalysts are producing many ideas which can benefit the environment even more!

Thank you very much for reading the blog.

Henry Harrison.

Find out more about Young Catalysts here.